Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security

Chinese Espionage against the United States

The question of Chinese espionage against the United States animated
policy and intelligence circles during the

In the first case to reach trial under the 1996 Economic Espionage
Act, which banned the theft of trade secrets, Hwei Chen
"Sally" Yang was found guilty of economic espionage in
1999.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

.

second half of the 1990s, driven by a number of factors, not least of
which were allegations that members of the administration of President
William J. Clinton had accepted campaign donations from Chinese sources.
An investigation by the House Select Committee on U.S. Nuclear Security
and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of
China, chaired by Christopher Cox (R-CA), found that the People's
Republic of China (PRC) developed a number of key warheads based on U.S.
designs, but failed to establish that this information had come through
espionage. Still, the issue of Chinese spying simmered, and finally
reached a climactic point with the arrest of Wen Ho Lee, a computer
scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1999.

In October 1996, the
New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and
Los Angeles Times
ran a number of stories detailing a connection between John Huang,
principal deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for International
Economic Policy, and Indonesia's Riady family, which had close ties
to China. It would eventually be revealed that the PRC had funneled
sizeable contributions to the Democratic National Committee through a
number of intermediaries. Critcs pointed out that, near the same time, the
Clinton administration approved the sale of defense satellite technology
to the PRC.

Meanwhile, concerns had arisen with regard to Chinese weapons technology,
its links with U.S. technology, possible espionage against the United
States, and security breaches that had facilitated that espionage. These
were the issues that sparked the investigation by Cox's committee
in 1998.

The PRC had never been involved in the kind of broadly based espionage on
American soil that the Soviet Union had conducted through the KGB and its
U.S. agents. The Chinese did, however, have an interest in U.S. technology
that had led to efforts at covert acquisition noted as early as 1984, in a
report by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Cox Report, as the findings of the House committee were called,
asserted that the Chinese had appropriated information on seven warheads,
including the W88, deployed on the D-5 submarine launched-ballistic
missile. This information, the committee concluded, had come from one of
the U.S. weapons laboratories operated by the Department of Energy (DOE).

The investigation.
The House committee completed its seven-month investigation in December
1998, as Clinton's impeachment on unrelated charges loomed (he
would eventually be acquitted by the Senate), and published its report in
May 1999. In the meantime, the FBI had undertaken an investigation,
code-named "Kindred Spirit," of persons who had access to
W88 information.

If the Chinese had indeed stolen data on the W88, the theft had occurred
in the 1980s, long before Clinton was president; therefore, the results of
the Kindred Spirit investigation had nothing to do with Clinton per se.
However, the Clinton administration's handling of the situation
resulted in continued criticism.

The Wen Ho Lee incident.
Taiwanese-born computer scientist Wen Ho Lee had been an employee at Los
Alamos National Laboratory for 21 years when Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson fired him in March 1999. Lee was subsequently arrested by the
FBI, charged with not properly securing classified materials and failing
to report meetings with individuals from "sensitive"
countries, and held for a year. During this time, many observers
maintained that Lee was a scapegoat, and some Asian Americans charged that
his arrest was motivated by racism. At his trial in September 2000, Lee
was convicted on only one of the charges against him—illegally
gathering and retaining national security data. Though this was a felony
count, the court released him on time served, and ordered him to undergo
60 hours of government debriefing.

Many commentators charged that, if there was an information leak from the
Los Alamos lab, and if Lee had anything to do with it, he was only a small
part of a much larger problem. Security at the laboratory was considered
by many security experts to be inadequate, given the sensitive nature of
the work that took place there. For example, in April 2000, two computer
drives disappeared from a high-security area and reappeared two months
later behind an office copier in another part of the facility. Security
breaches such as these prompted Congress to create the National Nuclear
Security Administration (NNSA) as a means of better protecting sensitive
properties—and partially removing oversight of those materials from
Richardson's DOE.

The title of an article in the
Wall Street Journal
called the Wen Ho Lee case a "diversion," and certainly the
case did create more questions than answers concerning Chinese espionage.
One of the reasons U.S. authorities have had a difficult time pinning
charges of spying on the Chinese is that much of their information seems
to have come from open sources. This became apparent with the
"discovery" of a 1991 volume, published in Chinese in
Beijing, titled
Sources and Techniques of Obtaining National Defense Science and
Technology.

Authors Huo Zhongwen and Wang Zongxiao, both PRC intelligence officers,
were frank in stating that Western technical journals "are the
first choice of rank and file S&T [science and technology]
personnel as well as intelligence researchers." Serendipity,
combined with failed security measures, also played a part; in the 1970s,
the U.S. government had accidentally declassified more than 19,000
documents on thermonuclear weapons. "This incident," wrote
Huo and Wang, illustrates that "…there is a random element
involved in the discovery of secret intelligence sources, and to turn this
randomness into inevitability, it is necessary that there be those who
monitor some sectors and areas with regularity and vigilance." This
statement is all the more ironic in light of the fact that a copy of
Sources and Techniques,
which first came to U.S. attention in 1999, had been sitting in the
Library of Congress for seven years.

Though the intricacies of the putative Chinese spy scandal in the late
1990s will perhaps never be known, it appears that much of the information
the PRC acquired was not a result of subterfuge, but rather of Western
openness—and, in some cases, the incompetence of individuals
charged with guarding secrets. In any case, the point became all but moot
after September 11, 2001. Not only did the United States have far worse
concerns than China, but President George W. Bush needed Chinese support
for America's war on terror. The issue of Chinese espionage,
therefore, was not so much resolved as it was set aside.

█ FURTHER READING:

BOOKS:

Cox, Christopher.
U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the
People's Republic of China.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1999.

Stober, Dan, and Ian Hoffman.
A Convenient Spy: Wen Ho Lee and the Politics of Nuclear Espionage.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.